


How Not to Lose

by Sineala



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, New Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Bad Decisions, Canon Temporary Character Death, Demons, Gen, Mindwiping, Moral Dilemmas, New Avengers Vol. 3 (2013), Secret Wars (2015), The Illuminati (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 02:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8949880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala
Summary: Everything dies. But Stephen Strange is a doctor, and he does what he can to avert the end of the multiverse.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gen character study of Stephen Strange during the incursions and Secret Wars. Some dialogue has been borrowed from the relevant issues. This was originally written for the [Strange Zine](http://strangezine.tumblr.com). Thanks to magicasen for beta!

Everything died long before the world ended.

Stephen should have known at the beginning, as T'Challa had, that the Illuminati were going to be difficult to live with. But he had been no stranger to adversity, and while they had their fights, they had made the world better, too. And he had always been able to live with secrets.

And then the incursions came, and they'd turned on each other.

Steve Rogers had joined them, in their web of secrets and lies, because Tony Stark preferred it when his conscience was another human being. And now his conscience was disagreeing, just as they'd all known he would. Destroy another world to save theirs? He couldn't.

T'Challa was talking with Steve on the balcony now. Biding time, because they all knew what Steve would say: he would insist that there was another option, a way not to lose, when it was clear to everyone but him that the only path was destruction.

"We're not going to be able to agree on this." Tony put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. "Cap won't. I wish," he began, and then he stopped, but Stephen had known him for over a decade, after all, and he knew what Tony wanted.

The answer was simple: Steve needed not to be here. Not to remember.

Stephen held Tony's gaze. "I can take him out of the equation."

"Yes," Namor said, dryly, "because that's not threatening at all."

Surely by now they all knew they could hurt each other. Stephen raised an eyebrow. "If you have a better solution, Namor--"

"No, no." Namor sat back, an amused smile on his face. "Don't let me stop you."

"There won't be pain," he told Tony. "No damage. I can localize the amnesia to us. To this. It will all be a bad dream to him."

Tony's gaze was haunted, but he nodded. "All right."

No one said no.

Steve and T'Challa came back in; the argument again ramped up. As Steve made what was to be his final, defiant plea, everyone else in the room was looking at Stephen. They knew.

Then came his cue. Tony glanced across the table at him, his face hard. "Do it, Stephen."

"You were never here," he said. His hands glimmered with energy. "You will remember none of this."

Stephen reached out, and he set the end of everything in motion. A simple spell, little more than a cantrip, sliding through Steve's mind, slicing up his hippocampus with more precision than a scalpel could ever have afforded. _Forget_ , the spell said.

As Steve sprawled on the cold stone floor of the Necropolis, Stephen knew he'd doomed them. They were eating each other alive. He wasn't a mindless weapon. He wasn't a loaded gun. He could have refused, and he hadn't, because he'd known there was no other way. There were no other solutions, except the one Steve Rogers would not countenance. But this too meant the end of it, because when they hurt each other, there was nothing else left.

"I hope you know what you're doing, Tony," Reed said to Tony's retreating back, as Tony flipped his suit faceplate down, scooped Steve's unconscious body up in his arms, and began the long walk through the Necropolis to where he had undoubtedly left the Avengers' Quinjet.

Tony said nothing.

As it turned out, he didn't know what he was doing.

As it turned out, none of them did.

They'd spent ten years guiding the world of superheroes from the shadows, ten years debating and fighting, and they'd never been able to live with each other. This disagreement should have been more of the same. Stephen had expected that.

What he hadn't expected was that they'd never be able to live with themselves.

* * *

Wong stood in the doorway with another pile of books balanced in his arms, but Stephen already knew they weren't going to be the right ones. He'd spent three days going through every tome he owned, but none of them had the answers. None of them could tell him how to fix the multiverse.

"No," he said, under his breath, as if denial were a spell, and he ran his hands through his hair. "No, no, no."

If the answers weren't here--

He was going to have to go elsewhere. He didn't like the thought of that.

There were no other options.

* * *

He sat in another room beneath the Necropolis, and he watched a very different kind of surgery.

"Wire strippers, please," Tony said, and he held his hand out. T'Challa slapped them into his palm.

There was one bomb assembled, and three more in pieces. Tony could have made them himself. Half the Illuminati could have made them themselves. But Tony had insisted on enlisting Reed, T'Challa, and Namor's help. Black Bolt sat silently in the corner, and Stephen felt a kinship with him. Nothing for him to do.

Tony lifted his head and grinned crookedly, a detonator in his hand. His gaze settled on Stephen. "I hope you're not bored, Doctor."

Stephen gathered his cape around him; he always felt cold, in the Necropolis, the purely psychosomatic chill of his own conscience. "No. It's fascinating."

It was. He liked systems and rules. Predictability. Knowledge. Engineering was another kind of magic, one to which he was entrusting his life.

"I'd ask you to help too," Tony said, "but it's a little--" He stopped, and Stephen could fill in the missing words. Delicate. Fragile.

His hands would shake.

But he knew why everyone was helping. Tony wanted the blood on everyone's hands. The price on everyone's souls.

Stephen supposed he'd already started to pay.

* * *

At first, the multiverse was merciful. The hard choice, destroying another's Earth to save their own, was taken out of their hands. The world was eaten by Galactus. The world was dead. Lifeless. Unoccupied. Destroyed by the Mapmakers.

They had timers in their palms, countdowns to the next apocalypse, and every one of them was taken care of by someone else.

They'd prepared for it. They had the bombs. But they hadn't had to choose.

"You need to think about the unthinkable," Namor told them, as they watched a planet die. "That will be us."

Tony and Reed turned away, T'Challa seethed, and Black Bolt said nothing.

* * *

He'd sworn it to the Illuminati: if he was to be damned, it would be by his own decisions.

So he went to the Sinner's Market and he sold his soul. What was left of it.

He'd done it just in time; when he came back, Namor sneered at him and told him the Great Society was here. Their first inhabited Earth. Tony stared at him from across a stone room, broken and bloody, and he knew before Tony said it that the mindwipe he'd laid had failed, because no one else would have presumed to lay hands on him.

Everything was dying.

* * *

He summoned a demon.

It sounded so simple, when he said it like that. He wondered if to his fellow Illuminati it looked simple, if it looked as easy as Reed stretching his arms or Black Bolt raising his voice.

He opened his mouth, and he said the words, and then he was something else. He was consumed. Waves of pain wracked him as the first of the tentacles rose up around him, as his eyes went wide, as the world became fire. There was a price for his magic, and he paid. He would save Earth.

The Great Society fell beneath him and died.

His actions were shown to him in fragmented images: a hero crushed, strangled, burned. He felt no remorse; there was nothing in him to feel remorse. He let the magic take him.

And then Tony hit him with a repulsor ray.

* * *

When he came to, Tony, unarmored, was holding him in his bandaged arms, and the sky above them was still red. He had sold his soul and the world still burned.

"Jesus, Strange," Tony said. There was even more blood on his face. "And here I thought you were the stable one."

"Why the hell would you think that?" he slurred, and he passed out again.

* * *

He was sitting on a rock, in the sand, with what was left of the Great Society's Earth darkening the skies. He was curled over himself, trying to piece together what was left of his mind. 

Reed held out the bomb.

He'd given his soul. What more could they want of him?

This, apparently.

He raised his head, and Reed saw his face and recoiled. "Ask nothing," he said, "as I already gave all that I had."

It was time to bomb another world, and there was nothing of him left. It couldn't be him. One by one, everyone else refused. Perhaps Steve Rogers had been right.

So Namor did it. Of course.

* * *

Ten minutes later, as Namor was walking away, there was another incursion. Another chance to bomb a world. They looked at each other, and Stephen saw something awful and broken in their eyes. They resolved to do nothing. They should already have known that he could not abide that. They'd seen what he'd been willing to do.

They had given up searching, but he would find the answers. There had to be a way to save the world.

So when everyone else had made their peace, had prepared to die -- he left. He opened a door from his Sanctum Sanctorum, threw it wide, and found the other side.

He walked through worlds and found Victor Von Doom at the heart of it all, worshipped by the Black Swans. He found Doom and the Molecule Man trying to save the multiverse. He stood next to Doom as the remains of the multiverse stretched out before them. 

"Join me," Doom said.

He did not say no. 

And then--

Everything died.

But something still lived, somewhere else.

* * *

He was Sheriff of Agamotto and he enforced the laws of Battleworld's god. Doom had stolen Reed's family and raised them to live with him. It was wrong, perhaps, but surely Reed was dead. Surely he had died in the last incursion. It didn't matter if Reed would have objected. Reed didn't get a vote. It wasn't a democracy.

The other people of Battleworld didn't remember the time before Doom in quite the same way he did. They were wrapped up in their realms, in their warzones, in their fragmented worlds. He remembered the incursions. The Illuminati. Every bargain he had made, and how he had damned himself for them. He'd had years to ponder it, after all.

It wasn't that it had been entirely bad, with Doom. They had saved the multiverse. There hadn't been any other way. _Do no harm_ , he'd learned, long before he'd learned magic, and he'd saved lives.

That had been worth it. As long as he didn't consider the rest of what he'd done. What he'd passively condoned.

Then they found the lifeboat.

Reed wasn't dead.

Well. Someone was going to be very, very annoyed with his new god-emperor.

* * *

He stood on his Isle of Agamotto, and he prepared to commit treason. Or maybe heresy.

"Are you ready for this?" Reed asked, in the moments before they were summoned to battle. "Stephen, you don't have to--"

Reed had never said that before. He'd never said _you don't have to_ when the rest of the Illuminati had said _let's exile the Hulk, let's wipe Captain America's mind, let's build a room of bombs._

He'd been the consummate scientist. Cold, they always said of Reed. Pragmatic. He made his decisions in terms of numbers and statistics. He would -- and he had -- picked sides in war based on odds alone.

The odds here weren't good. If they went up against Doom, there would be death. And Doom wasn't going to be in any mood to resurrect them.

Everyone said this of Reed too: he loved his family. He'd do anything for them. The odds didn't matter. Not when it was Sue and Val and Franklin. But Reed knew what the odds were, and he was offering Stephen one last opportunity to get out.

Distantly, Stephen was aware that he wasn't coming out of this alive.

Stephen had spent eight years watching Susan call Doom her husband, and Valeria call him her father, and it had been wrong. But perhaps he could atone.

"I have to," Stephen said. "I want to. I owe you this."

He wanted to say _I saved an Infinity Gauntlet_ but even now, Doom might be listening to them. Namor could find it, perhaps. Or T'Challa. And that might be enough to dethrone a god. He could trust the Illuminati.

And now they could finally get it right.

* * *

They met Doom on the battlefield, and Stephen scattered the lifeboat's survivors to the winds. It was the only favor he could give them.

He stood alone with Doom on the plain.

"You're still afraid of Reed," he told Doom, and he could see the eyes behind the mask widen. "I think you should be."

Doom raised his hands. They crackled with lightning.

He couldn't swear by the Vishanti when only Doom was left, but it was an invocation nonetheless. _Make it count_ , he thought. _Make it count for something--_

And there was nothing.

* * *

He awoke.

He half-expected the familiar library mustiness of the Sanctum Sanctorum, a place years away from him on a long-dead world. He expected Wong's face, peering down at him in concern. Instead, sunlight diffused through his closed eyelids, grass scratched against his scarred hands. and the air smelled like spring. Life. Renewal. Resurrection.

When he opened his eyes, Reed was sitting on the ground, next to him, his back up against a tree.

"Oh," Reed said. "You're awake."

This wasn't Battleworld. This wasn't home, either.

"Where am I?"

"In between worlds." Reed stretched out an arm, stretched and stretched, and Stephen could see Franklin Richards, releasing bubbles into the air, a child with the most precious of toys. The bubbles gleamed like gems, sparkling bright with life. Universes. Multiverses. "We're making it all again, Stephen. We're putting it right."

"I get to go home?" He pictured it: home. His. His knowledge, his places, his things. His people. He was a traveler, another Odysseus. It had been eight years on Battleworld. Eight years for everyone. It had been long enough.

Doom was dead then, he supposed. Or alive again, probably. That sounded like Reed. Merciful.

He'd made it count, after all.

Reed nodded. "You all get to go home." He did not, Stephen noticed, say _we_.

They all paid, somehow.

"But," Reed added, "you won't remember. Battleworld. Any of this. No one will."

Stephen thought about Steve Rogers, lying on the floor of the Necropolis. The fight he'd started. Everything he'd erased and effaced that had bought them a year, and in the end they'd done nothing. But this was a new life. A new beginning. And for all he'd done, it had hardly cost him anything at all. His soul, once. His memory, now. A fair trade, for how this had begun. He'd made far worse bargains.

"It's all right," Stephen said, with a weary smile. "I've earned it."

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a [Tumblr post](http://sineala.tumblr.com/post/154794877154/fic-how-not-to-lose) if you want one.


End file.
